Author: michelle

Views: Aveo Amacuse

A Fan’s View on the Phrase ‘Aveo Amacuse’
By Alex

Stargate Relevance

In the episode 7.22 “The Lost City Part 2”, “Aveo Amacuse” are the last words that Col. O’Neill utters, his mind totally taken over by the Ancients’ knowledge, to his team mates. Daniel translates it simply as “Goodbye”, but the real meaning of this sentence has created animated discussion in the Stargate fandom ever since. This article tries to shed some light on the possible interpretations, using basic linguistic techniques and Classic Latin.

The Ancients’ Language

According to Stargate writers, Latin was the language originally spoken by the Ancients, and when they left Earth it was left to the Latins as their language. There are some historical problems with this concept: the original Latin speakers were a very small tribe of shepherds living on the hills in central Italy, with a very low level civilisation, that managed to create the Roman empire by being much more bellicose than their more civilised neighbours, like the Etruscans and the Celts. Combined with being very good at assimilating any culture they did come in contact with, this makes them very unlikely descendents of a highly cultured and peace oriented race like the Ancients. But it is the linguistic issues that the PTB theory raise, in particular in the sentence “Aveo Amacuse”, that I will focus here.

Language, like the culture that creates it, evolves from a state of relative simplicity to one of major complexity. If Pidgin Latin was the language spoken by such an advanced culture as the Ancients 10,000 years ago, you would expect Latin to have a widespread influence and complexity early on.

The history of the language tells us however a much different story. The first traces of the language appear in the 3rd Century B.C., much later than the 10,000 years ago the Stargate writers attribute to the Ancients. A massive gap to keep a language alive if we think that the first written text goes back to 240 B.C.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the Latin alphabet is a derivative of the Greek Alphabet with some Etruscan influences and not an indigenous creation. For at least the first three centuries of its recorded history, Latin was a language busy absorbing influences from its neighbouring languages, as young languages tend to do, and not influencing other languages, as established, mature languages with a literary tradition tend to do.

In the 3rd Century BC, when the Romans conquered the Greek-speaking south of Italy, it was said that “The colonisers were colonised by the colonised”, to indicate the influence that the militarily defeated Greeks had on the developing Latin culture and language. It is not a case that the first recorded Latin literary text is the translation of a Greek text by a Greek slave.

Latin did not become an influencing language until much later when history and the evolution of the language led to its transformation into an “Official Language” spoken by the Catholic Church and the Scientists (until well into the 17th Century, Latin was the language in which a Scientist wrote if he wanted to be understood by his peers, a bit like English today) and in the creation of the languages of the so called Neo Latin Family: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian.

The language that these countries and institutions inherited is a very complex and articulated one. However early Latin was a very basic language that borrowed heavily from its neighbours, especially Etruscan and Greek, a language descending from the same Indo-European family. Most Latin grammatical structures are similar to the Greek ones, including Verb tenses and the concept of declinations, that are particularly relevant while analysing Aveo Amacuse.

A Couple of Points on Latin Grammar

Forewarning: This article is written with mainly an English speaking audience in mind, so I will take time to explain some points of Latin grammar that may be new to an English speaking audience.

Latin Verbs: Entire, very boring books have been written on the subject. If you have ever tried to learn French irregular verbs, you may have an idea of the complexity of the language. There are between 10 and 15 different verb tenses, each one with its particularities. To us, only two of them are relevant: the Present and the Imperative. One of the main difference between Latin and English verbs is that English has basically two forms for each tense: one for the third person singular (s/he) and one for all the other persons. Latin has different forms for each of the 6 possible persons. This however does not apply to the imperative, where do we have one form for the single person and one for more than one person, e.g. Vale (I salute you as an individual), Valete (I salute you as a group of people).

Declinations: Where most modern languages (with the exception of German) use articles, other particles and position in the sentence to determine the context of a word in a phrase, Latin uses suffixes. There are 6 basic declinations (types of suffixes) and which ones you use is influenced by the requirements of the verb you use, by the meaning that you are trying to convey, and by the gender and number of people that you were talking to. For example, in Classic Latin, if Jack had wanted to say Goodbye Friend to Daniel he would have said: Ave Amicus. If Jack had wanted to say Goodbye Friend to Sam he would have said: Ave Amica. If Jack had wanted to say Goodbye Friend to the Team he would have said: Ave Amici.

However this would have been in Classic Latin and not Ancient Latin. I will try now, using Classic Latin and basic philological techniques to analyse Aveo Amacuse and come up with its possible meanings. I will analyse each word in itself and then bring everything together.

Aveo

According to the Calonghi Badellino Dictionary, the verb Aveo has two possible meanings:
1. To strongly desire, to crave something or somebody
2. Especially in the imperative form Ave, it was the Latins normal form of salutation.

Whatever interpretation we prefer, the verb tense is clearly the First person singular of the Present. While this does not create problems with the ‘desire’ meaning, Aveo as a form of salutation is extremely rare. Ave, the imperative, is the most commonly used form, the common correspondent to our Goodbye.

Amacuse

Possible derivations: While the root of this word is clearly that of the verb Amo (to love), and there are no recorded instances of the word Amacuse itself, there are two words that could have inspired the Stargate scriptwriters:
Amatus: meaning beloved
Amicus: meaning friend

While the use of the second A (AmAcuse) relates it to the first meaning, the C (AmaCuse) links it clearly to the second option. It is difficult to identify the word as singular/plural and/or male/female, because of the absence of any recognisable markers for the Classic Latin language.

Conclusion

While for the first word (Aveo), my personal inclination would be to follow Dr Jackson’s lead and go for the second interpretation (Goodbye), who exactly Jack was directing his goodbyes (the Amacuse), to his team, his lover (male or female), his friend (male or female) is still open for discussion and interpretation. Every fan is free to make what they want with it and to write stories using their personal interpretation.

Sources

Calonghi-Badellino Latin-Italian Dictionary
Traina-Pasqualini Morfologia Latina Traina-Bernardi Perini Propedeutica al Latino universitario.

Sumuru: The Breadbox Edition

Join us in enjoying Nialla’s hilarious new parody of the movie Sumuru. You know, the movie Michael Shanks starred in that he hopes will never be released in North America 🙂 Nialla has put her usual fan viewer spin on that unforgettable B-movie, and the result is a lot of fun! Enjoy it here:

Sumuru: The Breadbox Edition

SPOILER PICS FOR UPCOMING EPS (UPDATED)

Stargate-Project.com has some intriguing new pictures taken during the making of late Season 8 episodes. Click on the small images to bring up larger ones in a separate window.

8.13 “It’s Good to be King”
Wayne Brady looks a lot different as a bad guy than he did as a talk show host.

Edited to add:
8.17 “Threads”
Wherein we learn that the answer to one question is: briefs.

8.19 “Moebius Part 1”
8.20 “Moebius Part 2”
It appears the “Ra” storyline will be a major element of Moebius Part 1, while Part 2 features the “nerdy” versions of Daniel and Carter.

Thanks to Stargate-Project for providing these pictures!

URGENT CHARITY AUCTION ANNOUNCEMENT

In the middle of our current STARGATE auction, we are taking a moment to send our thoughts, prayers and help to a family in need at this time.

With the support of the cast of ANDROMEDA, we are conducting a special fund-raiser to help the family of 14 year-old Katrina Eschner, a student who was hit by a car in North Vancouver on October 28th. Katrina suffered severe head injuries in the accident and after slipping into a coma, was put on life support in B.C. Children’s Hospital with her parents at her bedside.

Katrina is known to Steve Bacic, who stars as Rhade on Andromeda [and as Camulus on Stargate: SG-1] and through her love of drama, was scheduled to visit the filming set. Sadly, this has now been postponed. With Steve as the driving force, the cast members of Andromeda have rallied round and donated a selection of set-used props, costumes and cast-signed items for this special charity auction for Katrina and her family.

We are donating ALL of the proceeds received through the sale of these special items to help Katrina’s parents cover the costs incurred by this tragic event. We hope you’ll find something of interest here and we also thank you for allowing us to interrupt your Stargate Auction. Here is the link to the sale:

http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/stargateprops

With kind regards,

Paul Brown
President
Legends Memorabilia Inc.
www.stargateprops.com
www.legends-memorabilia.com

SITE UPDATES: INTERVIEWS RESURRECTED

If you’ve been looking at the interview pages and noticed they were a little hard to read, being white text on white background, well, they’ve been fixed. All of the interviews linked from the “Shanks” and “Interviews” buttons should now be nicely viewable. Along the way some broken links and ‘lost’ articles were restored. The Michael Shanks bio is also readable now. Thanks for your patience, and the news archives will be fixed soon. Visit the Sitemap to see… a map of the site 😉

INTERVIEW: JOHN NOVAK

MASTER AND COMMANDER
AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN NOVAK

by Carole Gordon

Stargate SG-1 fans will recognise tall, suave John Novak as Commander Ronson of the Prometheus, but he will also be familiar to fans of ‘MacGyver’, ’21 Jump Street’, ‘Highlander’, ‘The Outer Limits’ and ‘Sliders’, as well as to theatre-goers at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada. During a recent visit to London for the Wolf 10th Anniversary event, he discusses his long, varied career with Carole Gordon.

John Novak

And his surprising line in hobbies. John’s immediate ambition, he says, is to finish his seven-foot high papier-maché sculpture of a stork. Why a stork?

“I did a tri-coloured heron,” he explains, “about three foot tall – and I got a remarkable amount of feedback on it. People liked it and I wanted to do a larger bird. Size matters in art, I’ve noticed!”

Tongue firmly in cheek, John describes the development of the stork’s design.

“This stork has been influenced by my convention experience. It’s slightly beyond real, a magical stork. I want to mythologise him a little, bring in a bit of the phoenix though I’m not sure how to go about it. He looks awfully wise and benign, but it could poke your eyes out!”

On a more serious note, John says that he originally trained for the theatre and spent the first few years of his career on stage, including roles at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford (Ontario), where he experienced considerable success.

“I had quite a good future on the stage, but I shifted to film and television. The theatre can be a fickle mistress – they [theatre directors] become afraid that, if you have a film and TV career and you commit to a play, if an offer is lucrative enough, you’ll buy out your contract and they’ll have to recast. So, once you’ve made that transition, they are mistrustful of you. You get out of the loop and it’s hard to get back in.”

John is particularly proud of his work as Bertram in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’. Helena, a maid, seeks Lord Bertram’s hand in marriage. Bertram agrees, but then flees to Italy to fight a war, hoping to die to avoid marriage. Eventually, after a complex Shakespearean series of errors and mix-ups during which Bertram sleeps with Helena believing her to be his new mistress, Diana, he confesses his love for Helena. John thinks the character of Bertram can easily come over as insincere and manipulative at the end of the play and was anxious to avoid this in his portrayal.

“I think I managed to pull it off and make him seem like a genuine, sincere guy. One of the problems of the piece is that he’s backed into a corner. If the actor isn’t capable, it’s like he’s trying to save his own ass, but if he is capable and it comes from here,” he says, hand over his heart, “he becomes genuine.”

“It’s one of dilemmas of Shakespeare that it comes from a time of honour and integrity where people were prepared to put their lives on the line over issues of their word. If they swore an oath, they’d have to be prepared to back it up with battle. Nowadays, people get to that point and they say, ‘Well my lawyer will be contacting your lawyer.’ Shakespeare has to have passion and conviction and that kind of commitment of energy and all those other ethereal values. How do you act honour? There’s something in the make up of an individual that I think has become washed out somewhat in contemporary times and I do hope we recoup that sense of honour and integrity and being prepared to risk everything on principle.”

He considers his Shakespearean experience to have been invaluable in other areas of his career, sometimes in unusual ways – such as working with Paddy Creen, who was Errol Flynn’s stunt double and later worked at the Stratford Festival as Weapons Master and Fight Choreographer.

Later, on ‘Highlander’, John worked with Bob Anderson, who had choreographed the fights that Paddy Creen did as Flynn’s double and more recently worked on the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy of movies and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’. Having that connection to Paddy Creen made it easier, John says, for Bob to trust that he was sufficiently well-trained for broadsword fighting.

“We used real heavy duty metal swords with electrical cords so they literally did spark and it wasn’t a computer graphic insert.”

‘Highlander: The Series’ was a world away from TV’s current obsession with reality shows, which John feels are destroying employment opportunities for many devoted and dedicated actors.

“It’s a scary thing. Apart from being a financial threat to me specifically, I think it’s a scary statement of the times. People have been slowly detaching themselves from primary experience, first-hand, person-to-person contact. Experience has been giving way to a synthesised life. It’s curious and a little disconcerting and I hope it passes.”

After seven years in Los Angeles, John recently moved back to Vancouver, where the business is every bit as tough as in California. Government support for the arts is high on the agenda in Canada, but John does not feel this is an answer.

“One of the things I had to embrace when I first became an actor is that no city or town owes you a living because you have chosen to take that particular path. There are those who have felt that they could maybe legislate some work their way. That can be a compromise in the quality. It’s a dog eat dog business and you’d like to think that it’s based on talent.”

He admits to a certain cynicism. “Unfortunately, if it were only that fair, but my experience is that it becomes a real political game in terms of how work manifests in some people’s hands and not in other’s.”

There is also the difficult issue of movie distribution.

“You have to be able to put the stuff in the theatres and if the theatres are owned by the Americans, then you can try to legislate as much Canadian content as you want, but if it’s not good and it’s not entertaining, then it’s like putting a band aid on a gaping wound.”

John Novak

Like most actors, he has to deal with the frustration of seeing some of what he considers his best work ending on the cutting room floor. When shooting ‘Fight for Justice: The Nancy Conn Story’, John had a highly emotional scene with Marilu Henner, whose character had been abducted and left for dead. Unable to deal with the physical and emotional damage done to her, Nancy’s boyfriend, played by John, has to tell her that he is planning to leave town. The scene was shot a number of times in different interpretations.

“Unfortunately, in the arc of the story, it wasn’t supposed to be a particularly important scene. It’s a step onto the climactic point which has to do with the apprehension of the criminal. So when they actually cut the thing together, they took the least, the most passive scene of the bunch so that it wouldn’t interfere with the arc of the story.”

Although he accepts that there are valid reasons for using a particular take, it still hurts, he says.

“We had this amazing scene and they decided to go with the least affecting one of them all.”

He also argues that producers and directors are often concerned that the star of their production should not be outshone.

“There’s a concept, there’s a show and it’s built around the figurehead and the figurehead is the star of the thing. If they challenge his strength and focus by bringing in people who might overshadow him – it just doesn’t work. You don’t want guys who are taller than the hero, or necessarily, too affable.”

On the other hand, he says with a laugh, you can have great villains.

“The better the villain, the more contrasting a backdrop it becomes for the hero. A hero looks really heroic if you’ve got a really, really really bad guy. So in many respects, in order to serve the drama, the responsibility of being the villain is a big one. You have to make them convincing.”

In his most recent work though, John played the “good guy”, starring alongside Daniel Baldwin in the movie, ‘Irish Eyes’. The story revolves around two brothers who lose their father to the Irish mob at a young age.

“It’s about family,” he says. “One [brother] goes after them with guns and I go after them with the law. So the guy who goes after them with guns becomes an outlaw himself, but he’s my brother.”

He is especially pleased with a poignant scene at the end of the movie which, he says, “just floors the audience”. But the scene nearly wasn’t shot.

“The young guy who wrote, directed and produced the movie [Daniel McCarthy] came to me and said ‘There’s this pretty long eulogy at the end and I don’t know if it will work or not. We’ve shot so much time of the movie already. What do you think if we cut it?’ I said, ‘If you feel like it’s necessary to cut it, then that’s what you do. But you can’t cut what you haven’t shot. And I think you did some good writing, so let’s give it a shot and we’ll see.’ We shot the thing and it became the end of the movie, it was so potent.”

John isn’t entirely happy with the opening of the movie, which he feels is a little weak.

“It’s set circa 1950s, so they went for a photographic style that suggests a home movie quality. We know that audiences are somewhat fickle and if you can’t grab them quickly at the top, they can wander.”

What’s next? Well, he would be delighted to appear on Stargate SG-1 again, though he agrees that the Prometheus is not exactly the best-looking ship in space.

“It’s a bit like a brick with wings,” he says with a grin. “It’s reliable though – it’s the Volvo of space!”

Nevertheless, he thoroughly enjoyed working on Stargate SG-1.

“To be sitting at a commander’s console, looking out into space, you go, oh my god, I’ve arrived! I’ve joined the world of Bill Shatner and Jean-Luc Picard!”

John Novak

With grateful thanks to John Novak for his time, and to Katherine and Karen of Wolf Events for arranging the interview.

A list of all of John Novak’s appearances in Stargate SG-1 can be found at: John Novak

Filmography: A detailed filmography for John Novak can be found at: IMDB

Wolf Events organise conventions and events around the UK and in other European countries. Full details of their current programme of events can be found at: Wolf Events

(c) Carole Gordon, 5 September 2004